An accessible website is one that people with disabilities can use: someone who moves through pages with a keyboard instead of a mouse, someone who listens to them through a screen reader, someone with low vision who zooms in, someone who is deaf and relies on captions. The Department of Justice has long held that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to the websites of businesses open to the public, and its guidance on web accessibility and the ADA sets out that position.

Making an existing website accessible takes careful work, and a small business can recover part of the cost. Since 1990 the federal tax code has offered the Disabled Access Credit for money a small business spends to make itself accessible to people with disabilities. It is claimed on IRS Form 8826, it is available in every year that has eligible costs, and it is easy to overlook.

What the Credit Is Worth

The credit is 50% of the year’s eligible access expenditures above the first $250, counting up to $10,250 of spending, so the most it can be is $5,000 a year. For example:

• Spend $2,250 and the credit is $1,000: half of the $2,000 above the first $250.
• Spend $6,250 and the credit is $3,000.
• Spend $10,250 or more and the credit is $5,000.

A credit reduces the tax you owe dollar for dollar, which makes it worth more than a deduction of the same amount. The Disabled Access Credit is part of the general business credit, so an amount you cannot use this year can generally be carried back one year or forward up to 20 years.

Who Can Claim It

The credit is for eligible small businesses. Your business qualifies for a tax year if, in the previous tax year, it had either:

• gross receipts of $1 million or less, or
• no more than 30 full-time employees, counting as full-time anyone who worked at least 30 hours a week for 20 or more weeks of the year.

Companies in the same controlled group, or under common control, count as one business for these limits. Partnerships and S corporations figure the credit for the business and pass it through to their partners or shareholders.

Which Website Costs Can Count

Eligible access expenditures are amounts a small business pays to meet the requirements of the ADA. The law behind the credit includes the cost of removing barriers, communication barriers among them, that keep a business from being accessible to or usable by people with disabilities, and the cost of effective ways to make audio and visual material available to people with hearing or vision impairments. The costs must be reasonable and necessary for those purposes.

The IRS has not published a list of website costs, but work like the following fits those purposes:

• an accessibility audit that finds the barriers on your site and explains how to remove them
• fixing the code: text alternatives for images, labels on form fields, headings in a logical order, enough color contrast, and links and buttons that work from the keyboard with a visible focus
• making forms, booking and checkout work with screen readers and keyboards, with error messages that say what to correct
• captions and transcripts for video and audio
• accessible versions of the PDFs and other documents you publish
• testing with assistive technology, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers

Only the accessibility work counts. If the fixes are part of a larger redesign, the new look and new features are not access expenditures, so ask for the accessibility work to be listed separately on the invoice. The same dollars cannot count twice either: the instructions on Form 8826 say that the part of the cost the credit covers cannot also be deducted, capitalized or used for another credit. Whether a particular cost qualifies is a question for your tax adviser.

How to Claim It

1. Check that your business met the receipts or employee test in the previous tax year.
2. Keep the records: the audit report, which shows the barriers that were found, and invoices that list the accessibility work.
3. Give them to your tax preparer, who files Form 8826 with your return. Filing the form is how you elect to take the credit, which then joins your other general business credits on Form 3800.
4. If the work will run across two tax years, ask your adviser about timing: the $10,250 limit applies to each year’s spending.

How We Can Help

We audit websites against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. Automated scanners catch only part of the problems, so we also test each page by hand: with the keyboard alone, with a screen reader, zoomed in, and at phone width. You receive a report that lists each barrier, where it is and how to fix it, in order of priority.

We can then fix what the audit finds, or work alongside your developers, and test again to confirm each fix. Our invoices list the accessibility work separately, so your tax adviser can see what was spent on it. We hold our own website to the same standard: every change to this site is checked against WCAG 2.2 AA before it goes live.

To find out what your website needs, request a free quote and mention accessibility in your project summary.

This article is general information, not tax or legal advice. Tax rules change, so confirm the details for your business with your tax adviser.